Sunday, November 30, 2014

To mark Jewish Refugee Day, Sandy Rashty of the Jewish Chronicle records the stories of several Jews who fled Arab countries.

A Syrian Jewish family at the turn of the century, smoking narghile

"Jews from Arab lands suffered - their story should be told. They weren't just uprooted; their history was uprooted."

So says Florette Hyman, who was born Florette Menir in Cairo, and who
came to the UK in 1957 after her family was forced to leave Egypt.

"Everyone is talking about the Palestinian refugees. I feel that no
one has asked the question: What about the Jews from Arab lands?" she
said.

Until now, there has been no official date to mark the mass exodus of
Jews who abandoned their homes and businesses in the face of increasing
persecution in Arab countries after the state of Israel was established
in 1948.

Over
870,000 Jewish refugees were driven out of Arab countries and sought
sanctuary around the world, including in the UK where they make up just
under five per cent of British Jewry.

This year, the Knesset in Israel passed a bill designating November
30 as the official day to commemorate the stories of Jews who fled Arab
countries such as Iraq, Egypt, Syria, as well as Iran.

Some of the refugees have campaigned for restitution, hoping to
regain the property or value of the capital lost at the time of
displacement. Others just want to be heard.

Mrs Hyman, now 64, was eight-years-old when she left Egypt for
Britain. Along with her parents and five siblings, she lived in one-room
in a refugee camp near Leeds. Her father Abraham, grateful for the
"haven", wrote a letter of thanks to the Queen and named his youngest
daughter Elizabeth after her.

"I'm quite emotional talking about it now," Mrs Hyman said. "When
Israel was created, it was dangerous for Jewish people to go out at
night in Egypt; they would disappear.

"I remember a policeman coming into our house with papers on a Friday
night, saying we had to leave. My father's family had been in Egypt
since the 12th century.

"Everything we had was taken away from us - my father's packing
company was taken away. They made roads out of the tombstones in Jewish
cemeteries. I can't even go back and visit my grandfather's grave." In
1948, more than 80,000 Jews lived in Egypt - now, there are fewer than
15.

Roger Bilboul attended the Jewish Lycée de l'Union Juive school in
Alexandria before leaving, aged 18, in 1959. He has backed an
international campaign to regain access to Jewish archives left in
Egypt.

"I left because of the situation, it wasn't good for Jews," recalled Mr Bilboul, who now lives in London.

"People were being put in prison all the time with no excuse. There
was the nationalisation of Jewish businesses, a lot of stuff was
confiscated and left behind. Some people are now going through the
courts to try and get back their property.

"The contribution that Jews made has been largely forgotten; but it's
something Egyptians themselves are now keen to put on the map."

Moshe Kahtan, whose father Saleh was a legal adviser to the Iraqi
Ministry of Finance, also regrets that the contribution made by Jews has
been forgotten. He dismisses the prospect of restitution as "wishful
thinking".

"Freedom," he said. "You better forget this word in that place - it didn't exist for Jews.

"At its peak, half of the population in Baghdad was Jewish. In the
1930s, they started relieving Jews of their positions… they were
imitating what was happening in Nazi Germany. Jobs were taken over by
Muslims. Jews had a yellow identity card - they confiscated my
passport."

This Sunday is the Israeli national day for commemorating the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Over 40 events are being planned all over the world to mark the day. Stephen Oryszczuk in the UK publication Jewish News finds out why the issue is a question of justice:The Israeli government this year
designated a new day, 30 November, to remember historic wrongs done to
the Jewish people. The wrong in question was the uprooting of 850,000
Jews from ancient communities in Arab and Muslim lands, including Iran,
after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Some call it a period
of “systematic persecution” or “ethnic cleansing”.

Events will be held around the world on
Sunday. There will be a Board of Deputies reception at the Jewish
Museum in Camden. On Saturday at St John’s Wood Liberal Synagogue,
historian Nathan Weinstock will explain “how a Belgian Ashkenazi Jew
wrote the story of the eradication of Jews from Arab lands”.

Weinstock says the story “demands an
understanding of the dhimma – Jewish social status under Islam – and an
appreciation of the repercussions of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict,
leading to the great post-World War II Jewish exodus”.

Once-equal Jewish citizens were
persecuted, Jewish stores and workshops were looted, Jewish workers were
fired and Jews were restricted from entering universities. Expelled
from Egypt, displaced in Iraq and held hostage in Syria (on the
suspicion that they would “join the Zionist enemy” and attack their
country of birth), most left when they could, leaving all possessions
behind. The story is one of immense sadness.

Many Sephardi Jews had deep cultural
ties to the land, and influenced it greatly. Jewish writers were the
foundation of Iraqi literature, for example, and in mid-19th century
Egypt, the man who invented the nationalist slogan ‘Egypt for the
Egyptians’ (known as ‘the Egyptian Molière’) was a Jew named Jacob
Sanua. The repercussions of this huge and little-known upheaval shape
today. “No understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict is complete
without taking into account the fact that half of all Israeli Jews are
descended from, or are themselves, Jewish refugees from Arab or Muslim
lands,” says the Board of Deputies.

But why is the issue only now being
recognised? “Successive Israeli governments didn’t really make much of
it, contrary to what Arab countries did for Palestinian refugees,” says
Baghdad-born Edwin Shuker, who now lives in London. “It was a huge
mistake on many levels. There are fewer than 5,000 Jews left in Arab
lands. I am part of a dying generation. We want this narrative
incorporated into the Jewish people’s story.”

For Shuker, the 30 November
commemoration “opens a new chapter” in that story, and Lyn Julius,
co-founder of Harif, the UK association of Jews from the Middle East and
North Africa, agrees that it is a “watershed” moment. But she says the
refugees themselves partly explain the slow process of recognition.
“When they came to Israel in the 1950s, they compared themselves to
Europe’s Jewish refugees, to Holocaust survivors.

What happened to them was far worse, so
they thought ‘let’s just get on with it, let’s not make a fuss’.” It
was early in the state’s creation, and the country needed to build an
Israeli identity, she explains. “Forget the past and move on, that was
the only way to integrate Jews from 130 countries,” says Julius.

“Politically, it was disastrous, and
the Palestinians made all the running, screaming that they were the only
refugees, which the world bought.” Some are cynical about the timing of
the Knesset law, which came in the middle of the peace negotiations
with the Palestinians earlier this year. Arab- Israeli peace process
analyst Dr Constanza Musu says Israel “conducted a very systematic
campaign to have the issue of refugees addressed in the negotiations”.

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Iranian Jews pray at the tomb of a rabbi in Yazd (photo: Iranian Media ) This AP dispatch has gained wide coverage in the Israeli and western press. Timed to coincide with the Iran nuclear talks, it is designed to curry favour with the West, and the US in particular. Cloaked in a veneer of objectivity, it projects an image of an Iran tolerant of its minorities. Gone is the extremist Ahmadinejad - the regime under Ayatollah Rouhani is 'moderate'. Why are 1,000 Jews going on pilgrimage, and who is the rabbi they are venerating? The article does not tell us.

YAZD, Iran (AP) — More than a thousand people
trekked across Iran this past week to visit a shrine in this ancient
Persian city, a pilgrimage like many others in the Islamic Republic —
until you notice men there wearing yarmulkes.

Iran,
a home for Jews for more than 3,000 years, has the Middle East’s
largest Jewish population outside of Israel, a perennial foe of the
country. But while Iran’s Jews in recent years had their faith
continually criticized by the country’s previous governments, they’ve
found new acceptance under moderate President Hassan Rouhani.

“The government has listened to our grievances
and requests. That we are being consulted is an important step
forward,” said Homayoun Samiah, leader of the Tehran Jewish Association.
“Under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, nobody was listening to
us. Our requests fell on deaf ears.”

Most of Iran’s 77 million people are Shiite
Muslims and its ruling establishment is led by hard-line clerics who
preach a strict version of Islam. Many Jews fled the country after the
1979 Islamic Revolution. Jews linked to Israel afterward were targeted.
Today, estimates suggest some 20,000 Jews remain in the country.

Tensions grew under Ahmadinejad, who
repeatedly called the Holocaust “a myth” and even sponsored an
international conference in 2006 to debate whether the World War II
genocide of Jews took place. Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi once
accused Jews as whole of being drug dealers.

But since Rouhani took office last year, Jews
say they have been heartened by the support they’ve received. His
government agreed to allow Jewish schools to be closed on Saturdays to
mark Shabbat, the day of rest. Rouhani also allocated the equivalent of
$400,000 to a Jewish charity hospital in Tehran and invited the
country’s only Jewish lawmaker to accompany him to the United Nations
General Assembly in New York last year.

“We were fearful in the ’80s. We were feeling
the pressure. Now, we are not concerned anymore. We feel secure and
enjoy freedoms,” said Mahvash Kohan, a female Jewish pilgrim who came to
Yazd from Shiraz. “In the past, Israel and others were providing
incentives such as housing that lured some Jews. Now, it’s not like
that. And Iranian Jews have better living and working conditions in
Iran. So, no one is willing to leave now.”

Still, human rights groups say Jews and other
minorities in Iran face discrimination. Last year, officials in Iran’s
presidency denied that Rouhani had a Twitter account after a tweet that
appeared to be from the leader offered a greeting for Rosh Hashana, the
Jewish New Year. Iranian state television also has aired anti-Semitic
programming.

Those taking part in the recent Yazd
pilgrimage to the tomb of a famed Jewish scholar, however, praised the
Iranian government’s new outreach.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Iraqi-Jewish refugee arrives in Israel, 1951. To hear Lyn Julius being interviewed on the Voice of Israel about Jewish refugees from Arab lands, click here.

Barely three years after the Nazi Holocaust came to light, Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world. And the ghosts of Nazism haunt us still, argues Lyn Julius in the Times of Israel:

On 30 November, schools, ministries and
organisations in Israel and worldwide will be marking a new day in the
calendar — a day to remember the flight of Jewish refugees from Arab
countries and the destruction of their ancient communities.

It
is often said that these Jews paid the price for the creation of
Israel. In revenge for the mass exodus of Palestinian Arab refugees,
Arab mobs and governments turned on their defenceless Jewish citizens.
But in truth, there is sound evidence that even before the establishment
of Israel, and before the great mass of Arab refugees had fled, Arab
governments were conspiring to victimise their Jews and dispossess them
of their land and property.

This week, 67 years ago, saw anti-Jewish
tensions reach new highs in Palestine and the Arab world as Arab
delegates ramped up their rhetoric at the UN, which was due to vote on
the Partition of Palestine.

According to UN records the Egyptian delegate,
Heykal Pasha, was already warning on 24 November 1947 about the
consequences of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine:

“the United Nations…should not
lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a
million Jews living in Muslim countries…creating anti-Semitism in those
countries even more difficult to root out than the anti-Semitism which
the Allies tried to eradicate in Germany…making the UN…responsible for
very grave disorders and for the massacre of a large number of Jews.”

Heykal Pasha’s words were prefaced with talk of ‘massacre’ ‘riots’ and ‘war between two races’. According to Yaakov Meron,
Pasha’ s threats were not confined to Egypt but repeatedly mentioned
Jews in other Muslim countries. They were not uttered on the intiative
of Egypt but were ‘the outcome of prior coordination between Arab states
then represented at the UN and the Arab league.”

The Palestinian delegate, Jamal Al-Hussayni,
said the Jews’ situation in the Arab world “will become very precarious.
Governments in general have always been unable to prevent mob
excitement and violence.”

Syrian UN representative Faris Al-Khuri is
quoted in the New York Times as far back as 19 February 1947 stating
that: “Unless the Palestinian problem is settled, we shall have
difficulty in protecting the Jews in the Arab world.”

A Jewish publication reported: “With the
entire Arabic press fulminating against the perfidy of Zionism, and with
Arab politicians rousing their underfed and enervated masses to a
dangerous pitch of hysteria, the threats were certainly not empty.”

In Iraq the threats were made publicly, and its Foreign Minister Fadel Jamali stated at the UN:

“The masses in the Arab world
cannot be restrained. The Arab-Jewish relationship in the Arab world
will greatly deteriorate. There are more Jews in the Arab world outside
Palestine than there are in Palestine. In iraq alone we have about
150,000 jews who share with Muslims and Christians all the advantages of
political and economic rights. But any injustice imposed on the Arabs
of Palestine will disturb the harmony among Jews and non-Jews in iraq.
it will breed interreligious prejudice and hatred.”

Just two days after the State of Israel was
proclaimed, a New York Times headline on May 16, 1948 declared “”Jews in
Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands, Nine hundred thousand in Africa and
Asia face wrath of their foes.” An article, written by Mallory Browne,
reported on a series of discriminatory measures taken by the Arab League
against the Jewish residents of Arab League member states ( at that
time, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen).

The article reported on a: “text of a law
drafted by the Political Committee of the Arab League which was intended
to govern the legal status of Jewish residents of Arab League
countries. It provides that beginning on an unspecified date all Jews
except citizens of non-Arab states, would be “considered ‘members of the
Jewish minority state of Palestine.’ Their bank accounts would be
frozen and used to finance resistance to ‘Zionist ambitions in
Palestine.’ Jews believed to be active Zionists would be interned and
their assets confiscated.”

Text of draft law*

1. Beginning with (date), all
Jewish citizens of (name of country) will be considered as members of
the Jewish minority of Palestine and will have to register with the
authorities of the region where they reside, giving their names, the
exact number of members in their families , their addresses, the names
of their banks and the amounts of their deposits in those banks. This
formality is to be accomplished within seven days.

2. Beginning with (date), bank accounts of
Jews will be frozen. These funds will be utilized in part or in full to
finacne the movement of resistance to Zionist ambitions in Palestine.

3. Beginning with (date) only Jews who are
subjects of foreign countries will be considered as ‘neutrals’. These
will be compelled either to return to their countries with a minimum of
delay, or to be considered as Arabs and obliged to accept active service
with the Arab army.

4. Jews who accept active service in Arab
armies or place themselves at the disposal of these armies, will be
considered as ‘Arabs’.

5. Every Jew whose activities reveal that he
is an active Zionist will be considered as a political prisoner and will
be interned in places speficially designated for that purpose by police
authorities or by the Government. His financial resources, instead of
being frozen, will be confiscated.

6. Any Jew who will be able to prove that his
activities are anti-Zionist will be free to act as he likes, provided
that he declares his readiness to join the Arab armies.

7. The foregoing (para 6) does not mean that those Jews will not be submitted to paragraphs 1 and 2 of this law.

*Source : JJAC

In brief, the Draft Law was a prediction of
what was to happen to almost a million Jews in the Arab countries. It
became a blueprint, in country after country, for the laws that were
eventually to be enacted in these countries against Jews, for the
actions that devastated the Jewish communities in Arab lands; and for
the forced exodus that was to follow.

On 19 January 1948, the World Jewish Congress
sent a memorandum appended to the Arab League draft law to the United
Nations Economic and Social Council to protest against it and the
anti-Jewish unrest it had generated in the Arab world. Unfortunately,
the fate of this memorandum rested in the hands of the President of the
Council, Dr. Charles H. Malik, the representative of Lebanon to the
United Nations, designated by Arab states to be their Council
representative. Lebanon was one of the founding members of the Arab
League, one of the states which had deliberated upon the anti-Semitic
draft law. Mr. Malik used a procedural maneuver to ensure that nothing
was done in response to the World Jewish Congress memorandum.

Years later, in 1984, sitting in the garden of
his house with other Arab Affairs journalists, the Israeli columnist Dr
Guy Bechor challenged Charles Malik. Why did he do nothing to block an
anti-Zionist, nay antisemitic plan?

” Lebanon had no choice but to toe the Arab
line,”replied Malik. As a Christian he had to prove loyalty to the
Arab/Palestinian cause, and was even required to be more anti-Israel
than the Muslims.

What is shocking is that 856, 000 Jews were
driven from their homes by Nuremberg-style laws just three years after
after the full horror of the Nazi Holocaust of six million European Jews
had come to light. Nazism had a great following in the Arab world and
influenced reactionary movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood,
founded in 1928. Arab collaborators with the Nazis, such as the Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem, were never tried for war crimes in 1945. Instead,
antisemitism in Arab states, much of it using Nazi tropes and memes, has
soared to stratospheric heights.

The ghosts of Nazi-inspired genocide and
ethnic cleansing are still with us. The victims are still the same
victims: the Jews and their state, heretical Muslims, Kurds, non-Muslim
minorities. We can begin to exorcise these ghosts by learning about past
wrongs – beginning on 30 November.

A ma'abara or transit camp, home for Jewish refugees driven from their homes in the 1950s Sadly, the 'Benayoun affair' is overshadowing the first ever commemorative Day for Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Shimon Oyahon MK, the driving force behind the Law designating 30 November as the Day, says the singer's latest controversial release is a distraction from the real racism that caused the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab world. Read his Times of Israel blog (with thanks: Jonah) :

The controversy surrounding Amir Benayoun and
whether his recent song “Ahmed Loves Israel“ should lead to cancelation
of his invitation from the president’s residence has sadly become a
major distraction from a far greater injustice predicated on racism and
discrimination. Few people who have followed this front-page story
are aware that the event at which Benayoun was supposed to appear was
the first ever official state ceremony in commemoration of the Jewish
refugees from Arab countries.

The
real issue of racism here is the expulsion and forcing out of 850,000
people from their ancestral homes because they were Jews and no one is
talking about that, or has talked about it for 66 years. Suddenly a song
that some consider offensive is gaining attention and once again people
are forgetting about the historic injustice done to so many people that
has still not been rectified.

Unfortunately, most are not aware of the
history of the Jews and their eventual ethnic cleansing from the Middle
East and North Africa during the Twentieth Century. While the Land of
Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish People, for thousands of years
Jews developed their unique and indigenous civilization around the
Middle East. Jews and Jewish communities have existed in the Middle
East, North Africa, Babylon, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula and the
Gulf region for millennia.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

For years, the Holocaust has overshadowed the tragedy of Mizrahi dispossession. The new remembrance day being marked in Israel and around the world on 30 November will go some way to remedying this historical and moral distortion, argues Ben Cohen in JNS News. But the injustice done to these refugees remains unaddressed:

In
that environment, it has been difficult for Jews of Mizrahi
descent—those, like my family, who originate from communities in the
Middle East and North Africa—to get the State of Israel to properly
recognize the tragedy of their dispossession. The point wasn’t so much
competition with the Holocaust, but the bald fact that the Holocaust was
a civilizational convulsion without peer. And in any case, how many
times each year can a nation pause and weep?

Another
factor was politics. Israeli leaders for many decades were reluctant to
acknowledge that the expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries,
following the creation of the Jewish state, meant that there were not
one, but at least two, refugee populations in the Middle East. Only in
the last few years have prominent Israeli politicians emphasized that
focusing solely on the Arab refugees from British Palestine in 1948 is a
distortion of both history and morality.

It’s
interesting, perhaps, that the further we get from those torrid years of
Mizrahi Jewish suffering, the more Israel has embraced the memory of
what happened. Maybe we’ve gotten to a point where there’s space to
remember more than one Jewish tragedy, and without the raw emotion that
inevitably marked commemorations during the latter half of the 20th
century.

Whatever the explanation, this Sunday, Nov.
30, will mark the first instance of an annual remembrance day in which
Israel will commemorate, thanks to a Knesset bill passed in June, the
“Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran.”

Remembrance
ceremonies will be held, special classes will be conducted in schools,
and Israeli diplomats will raise the issue with their interlocutors. (In
tandem, incidentally, the Mizrahi Jewish advocacy organization JIMENA
is holding special events in North America and around the world, which
you can learn about by visiting them on the web.)

Commenting
on the Knesset bill after it was passed, MK Shimon Ohayon noted that
“we have finally corrected a historic injustice and placed the issue of
Jews who were expelled or pushed out of the Arab world in the last
century, on the national and international agenda.”

Elaborating,
he added, “In Israel, the history of the Jews who originally came from
the Middle East or North Africa, who make up around half of the
population, was ignored for too long. This is a vital part of our fight
against those internally and externally who delegitimize our presence
here and claim we are somehow foreign to the region.”

He’s
right. The theme of “indigeneity”—that those deemed to be native to a
particular territory have supreme rights over it—has been a core element
of the Palestinian and Arab campaign to portray Israel as a colonial
interloper, and an alien presence in a Muslim-Arab region. But Jews
lived in the Islamic world for thousands of years, just as they did in
the land that is now Israel.

In that sense, there is a
political goal behind the commemoration day, and it’s nothing to
apologize for. Almost 70 years after Jews were stripped of their
citizenship and property by avowedly anti-Semitic regimes, their fate
remains largely hidden from the gaze of historians and journalists. In
part, that’s because these refugees didn’t stay refugees for very long.
The majority were absorbed in Israel, still others went to Europe and
the Americas, all of them got on with their lives. But fundamentally,
the injustice remains unaddressed.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

It's the great legend peddled by the Jews about the King of Morocco: His Majesty saved them from the Nazis. In remarks at the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem on 21 October 2014, historian Georges Bensoussan sets the record straight:

"It's the great legend peddled by the Jews
of the Morocco: the King of the Morocco loved Jews and protected
them under Vichy. Actually, it's a thorny issue. I would say to you
in two words... Mohammed V was no self-declared philosemite ...
his vizier (Mokrane) was a self-confessed, hard-line anti-Semite who had said
to Paul Baudouin, the Foreign Minister of Vichy: "We put Jews under pressure
every 30 years... at the end of 30 years, when they have made a fortune,
we take it all; "it's been 28 years since you French have been (in
Morocco), in two years it will be 30..."

Bensoussan claims : "Mohammed V opposed not a single Vichy decree - he signed them all. It is true that he was forced to do so
by the French protectorate. It is true that the Bey of Tunis did the same, but with more reluctance. It is true that the resident-general in
Morocco, Nogués, was an anti-Semite and could have been egging the Sultan on.

"To say that he protected
the Jews and put off deadlines for signing Vichy decrees, is false. On the contrary - he took advantage of the arrival of the Vichy regime
in France to make an ancient Muslim demand, a demand that the French did not want to meet as long as they were a Republic..." First, the Jews must be relocated to the Medina (from the European city) and secondly, that the
Jews might only employ Muslim maids under 45. These two demands were made in much
of the Arab and Muslim world, in defiance of the French Republic. The Sultan
gets his way. Note that the demand concerning domestic servants under 45 is part of
the Nazi Nuremberg laws of 1935..."

Recording of George Bensoussan's talk at the Ben Zvi Institute (French)

"On the other hand,
it's true that the Sultan agreed to an audience with the Jews, but one realizes two
things when studying the chronology finely: he received them prior to
the Anglo-American landings. He told them: "you are as much my subjects as Muslims are". After the Allied landings, however, he shows himself much
more of a judeophile for simply political reasons.

He understood after his Casablanca meeting in January 1943 with Roosevelt, that to
obtain the independence of the Morocco, he should lean on the US for its backing. Otherwise, France would not let go of Morocco. As the
good anti-Semite that he was, he had to show support of the Jews to lean on the Americans because Washington is (in the pocket of) the Jews. "So if we
want to get closer to Roosevelt, we need to placate the Jewish community of Morocco, and therefore the Jews of the USA, who, in turn, will influence
Roosevelt's decisions".

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

A prestige event at the Israeli President's Jerusalem residence to mark the first national day to commemorate Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran threatened to degenerate into chaos today when President Rivlin banned one of the performers.

The
office of the President of Israel announced that following the
release of his song this week, it would not be possible for Israeli
singer Amir Benayoun to perform as planned this coming Sunday 30 November.

Benayoun, who is of Algerian origin, has just released a controversial song called 'Ahmed' whose lyrics could be considered disparaging of Arabs generally. Some have even called his words inciteful.

In a letter to
the event organizers, the President's office said that in spite of Amir
Benayoun's talents, his statements are ' inconsistent with the responsibility required of the President's
Residence, and of all institutions with influence over the public
discourse, to work to alleviate tensions, and promote cooperation rather
than division in Israeli society."

Adding fuel to the fire, however, the event organiser, Minister for Senior Citizens Uri Orbach, said that he would cancel his
own appearance at the upcoming event out of deference for Benayoun's
rights.

"The
cancellation of singer Amir Benayoun's concert at
the President's house, marking the expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands and
Iran, contradicts our position," Orbach stated. Orbach added that while he respects Rivlin, he views the cancellation as an infringement on freedom of expression.

Some 48 progammes have been arranged across the world to mark the first Day to remember Jewish refugees from Arab lands.

Those
are the only happy memories he has of the land of his birth. In the
span of a few years, through a steady campaign of violence and
expulsion, Iraq rid itself of a Jewish community that had thrived for
two millennia.

Khazzoom fled as a teen in 1951, vowing never to return to the
country that perpetrated unrelenting oppression against his family and
his fellow Jews.

Now a retired economics professor living in Sacra-mento, Khazzoom,
82, once served on the board of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle
East and North Africa), a San Francisco–based organization that
advocates for Mizrachi Jews and helps preserve their history.

Khazzoom is one of the 850,000 Mizrachi Jewish refugees from Arab
countries who were forced out of their homelands after World War II and
the establishment of Israel, and for whom justice has been denied. By
and large they built new lives in Israel, the United States and
elsewhere, choosing not to dwell on their misfortune.

But because the world ignored them, and because their countries of
origin refused to consider any compensation, organizations such as
JIMENA came into being.

Like other Jews from Arab lands, Khazzoom noted recent recognitions
by Israel’s Knesset, which in June passed a law mandating that Israeli
schools teach Mizrachi history, and which designated Nov. 30 as the
country’s first Day of Com-memoration.

And JIMENA has named November as International Mizrachi Remembrance
Month, with events taking place in Chicago, Portland, New York and
Ottawa, as well as the Bay Area.

A group of Jewish tailors from Algeria, 1901 photo/courtesy jimena

For Khazzoom, the new law and the celebrations may constitute a dose of too little, too late.

“I have mixed feelings,” he said. “In general we should not dwell on the misery. There are too many miseries in Jewish history.”

Nevertheless, JIMENA has helped organize several Bay Area
commemorations on behalf of the Jewish refugees displaced from Muslim
countries in the 20th century, among them Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and
Turkey.

One event, held Oct. 30 at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom,
featured speeches from Iraqi-born JIMENA co-founder Semha Alwaya and
Israeli Consul General Andy David, as well as a performance of Sephardic
songs by Israeli musician Yair Harel.

David praised the Knesset for passing the new education law.

Daniel Khazzoom

“Now it’s part of the curriculum,” he told J. “In a year or two
[Israeli] students will have to be tested on [Mizrachi history]. It will
be on a higher level of the agenda. It was the Israeli leadership that
advocated for it and wanted to pass it, not just Mizrachi Jews.”

Sarah Levin, executive director of JIMENA, called passage of the law “fantastic.”

“Everyone is so proud of the Knesset for passing this bill,” she
said. “Ideally it will have an impact on Jewish education curricula in
the United States.”

Corrine Levy, who came as a child to the United States from her
native Morocco, rejoiced at the passage of the law and spate of
commemorations. For her, it’s personal.

“I’m glad to see awareness is being raised,” said Levy, who serves as
director of women’s philanthropy at the S.F.-based Jewish Community
Federation. “We all know so much about Jews in the Holocaust. There were
very different circumstances Jews endured in the Arab world.”

For her family, it meant leaving their Casablanca home in the early
1960s, joining an exodus that shrank the Moroccan Jewish community from
more than 250,000 to around 3,500 today. Still, for Jews, Morocco was
perhaps the least intolerant Arab country.

Levy remembers playing on the roof of her grandmother’s home in Casablanca.

Daniel Khazzoom (left) with family members in Baghdad photo/courtesy jimena

“The Jews lived a very rich life in Morocco,” she said. “Even after [the
establishment of] Israel it was OK for them. They felt the monarchy was
favorable to the Jews. Many in business did commerce with the king.
However, when France ended its protectorate in 1958 (1956 - ed) and Morocco gained
independence, Jews felt they would lose everything. Many left for
Israel, some to France, Spain and Montreal.”

Unlike so many other Mizrachi Jews forced to leave everything behind
when they fled, Morocco’s Jews were treated more leniently. The Levys
were allowed to take their assets with them.

Monday, November 24, 2014

Yemen’s culture minister, who
was recently honoured for her work combating extremism and
discrimination against women, said she is giving her award to Yemen’s
dwindling Jewish population. Report in the Times of Israel:(With thanks: Michelle; Lily) See my comment below.

Arwa Othman won Human Rights Watch’s Alison Des Forges Award in September.
At a Thursday celebration in Sanaa, Othman called for “tolerance” and
dedicated her award to “brothers and friends from the Jewish community.”

Othman has been subjected to a smear campaign
by hard-line Salafi groups because of her civil rights work and support
for the Jewish community.

According to the Jewish Agency, fewer than 90
Jews live in Yemen — half of them in a guarded compound which protects
the US Embassy in the capital of Sanaa. They are often subject to
attacks by both Sunni and Shiite Muslim terrorists.

My comment: rights activists in Yemen are brave and outspoken (and in the past have had sympathetic coverage in the local press). They use Jews, the only non-Muslim minority, as a barometer of Yemeni society's human and civil rights in general. But it is not clear what the Jews' situation is like after the Houthi invasion. We do not even know how many Jews remain in Yemen - the figures quoted here* are almost certainly out of date.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Of all the refugee populations created after World War ll, only the Palestinians remain refugees, the historian Andrew Roberts points out in the Wall Street Journal. What is disappointing, however, is that he does not once mention the greater number of Jewish refugees in the Arab-Israeli exchange of populations, nor that many Palestinian Arabs were enthusiastic supporters of Adolph Hitler.

Yet all of these refugee groups, except one, chose to try to make the
best of their new environments. Most have succeeded, and some, such as
the refugees who reached America in that decade, have done so
triumphantly. The sole exception has been the Palestinians, who made the
choice to embrace fanatical irredentism and launch two intifadas—and
perhaps now a third—resulting in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians
and Israelis.

After Germany lost World War II in 1945, more
than three million of its people were forced to leave their homes in the
Sudetenland, Silesia and regions east of the Oder and Neisse
rivers—lands that their forefathers had tilled for centuries. These
refugees embarked on a 300-mile journey westward under conditions of
extreme deprivation and danger with only what they could carry in
suitcases.

One can’t be expected to sympathize too much with
people who had enthusiastically supported
Adolf Hitler,
but among them were children who were not responsible for the
sins of their fathers. Having reached the new borders of East and West
Germany, as delineated by the victorious Allies, they settled and made
no irredentist claims to Poland and Czechoslovakia, the countries they
had left. Today those once penniless refugee children include some of
the most successful people in Germany, a country they helped make a
prosperous, model democracy.

Across the Soviet Union in the late
1940s, the paranoiac evil of
Joseph Stalin
ensured that entire peoples, sometimes numbering in the millions,
were moved from one side of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. to the
other. Some, like the Cossacks who had fought for Hitler, were massacred
wholesale when they fell into the hands of Stalin or his satellite
henchmen, such as Yugoslavia’s Marshal
Josip Tito.

Millions of other people, as part of Communist schemes
unrelated to the war, were “relocated” to Siberia, the Crimea or Central
Asia, often many hundreds of miles from their ancestral lands and under
the harshest conditions short of genocide. In all, forced internal
migrations of the Tatars, Volga Germans, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays,
Meskheta Turks and other ethnic groupings numbering some six million led
to the deaths, according to the Soviets’ own figures, of up to 1.5
million, including 46% of the Crimean Tatars. Yet there are no
appreciable irredentist movements among these former Soviet citizens
today. They made the best of a new reality rather than carrying on a
decades-long and ultimately hopeless struggle to return.

Similarly,
the late 1940s saw massive population transfers in the Punjab and
Northwest Frontier territories of India when the British brought their
empire there to a close in 1947. Some 16 million people crossed between
the new states of Pakistan and India, leading to the deaths of between
one-half and three-quarters of a million people in the communal
massacres that ensued.

Yet while there are severe border
disputes still between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, practically no
one from the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities is today agitating for
restitution of the lands their forefathers farmed or owned in Punjab,
the Northwest Frontier or elsewhere. There is distrust, but modern
Indians and Pakistanis have moved on. The same is true of other parts of
the world, such as Burma and South Africa, which also saw ethnic
upheaval in the late-1940s.

Sadly, it has been the Arab states’
cynical and self-interested policy for nearly seven decades to keep the
Palestinians boiling with indignation. No one can doubt that for those
who have continued to live in camps intended for long-ago refugees, the
founding of the state of Israel in 1948, when thousands of Palestinians
fled or were expelled, was indeed a catastrophe. But many other peoples
have learned to deal with equal or worse by moving onward and upward;
calling them refugees several generations after their forebears’
upheaval would be unthinkable. The lessons of history are rarely
enunciated more clearly.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

This poster virtually accuses Jews of using the Ebola virus as a biological weapon for 'global occupation'. It's only one manifestation of an officially-sanctioned antisemitism reaching frenzied levels in Turkey. Read this MEMRI report and weep (with thanks: Lily):

Antisemitic incitement by Turkish government officials, Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's oft-repeated statements that Israel is
more barbaric than Hitler, and antisemitic accusations and threats by
the media that support and promote Turkey's AKP ruling party have
fostered an upsurge in antisemitism in the country. A recent survey by
Gonzo Insight, the Turkish polling institute, found that in just 24
hours, on July 17-18, 2014, 27,309 Turkish Twitter users sent 30,926
Turkish-language tweets in support of Hitler's genocide against the
Jews.[1]

In addition to statements by government officials, the pro-AKP media regularly accuse Turkey's Jews of "treason,"[2]
and other accusations are also levelled, including connecting Jews with
the use of Ebola as a biological weapon in "global occupation" that
"knows no borders"; in addition, a professor tweeted about sending Jews
to Treblinka.

Antisemitism is an accepted part of the government discourse; for
example, in protests following the May 2014 mine collapse in Soma, in
which over 300 miners died, then-prime minister Erdogan yelled at and
scuffled with a miner, calling him "sperm of Israel."

At the same time that President Erdogan was denying, in his
September 22, 2014 speech at the Council of Foreign Relations, that he
or his government were in any way antisemitic, members of his party back
homewere tweeting praise for Hitler, and shops in Istanbul were displaying signs reading "No Admittance To Jewish Dogs."

On November 9, 2014, a sign reading "This Location To Be
Demolished" was hung on the entrance to Istanbul's Neveh Shalom
Synagogue; the synagogue has already been the target of two major
terrorist attacks in which many congregants at prayer were killed and
wounded.

Friday, November 21, 2014

The release of the doves in the film 'The Dove Flyer'* is a metaphor for the exodus of Jews from Iraq.

Stella J was five when 93 percent of Iraqi Jews fled Iraq between 1949 and 1951. Her father was repeatedly called in for questioning by the secret police. He was forced to borrow money in order to pay 10, 000 dinars (a huge sum in those days) for his release.

When the time came for the family to join the exodus to Israel, Stella remembers a great deal of commotion at the airport. Jews were only allowed one suitcase and 40 dinars each (25 dinars for children). They were not allowed to take out jewellery or precious possessions.

The customs officers were busy ransacking the contents of the refugees' suitcases. One seized Stella's doll, threatening to pull apart its head. "I'm sure there is jewellery stuffed in the doll's body," the officer said. It was only when a second customs officer intervened that Stella's doll was spared mutilation.

She remembers a crowd witnessing the Jews' ordeal. They shouted abuse at the refugees. But then she recognised the voice of the family's long term servant Sa'id: "Take me with you to Israel", he shouted. "I want to be Jewish!"

Bitter-sweet memories. Within three years, a 2, 500-year-old civilisation had been wiped out.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Increasingly, we are hearing this slogan, as applied to the religious minorities of the Middle East. First it is the Jews' turn to be wiped out, then the Christians will follow. Where did this proverb come from? Opinions vary, but there is strong evidence that the saying originated with Islamist mobs in the 1930s and 40s. Extract from a Wikipedia entry: (With thanks: Edwin)

In the opinion of Benny Morris,
who again provides no source for the claim, around 1947-8 in Palestine,
‘all (Christians) were aware of the saying: 'After Saturday, Sunday,'
which he calls a 'popular mob chant' of the time and glosses as
meaning,'after we take care of the Jews it will be the Christians’
turn'.[14]

According to author Bat Ye'or, it was employed by members of the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt in 1947, as part of their demonstrations against Zionism,
which spilled over into attacks on Christian communities, held
accountable for attempts to secularize Arab society, in 1947. A Coptic church in Zagazig was burnt down, and in anti-Christian demonstrations in Upper Egypt the slogan was:

Today it is Zionism’s turn, tomorrow it will be Christianity’s; today is Saturday, tomorrow will be Sunday.[16]

According to blogger Gerald A. Honigman,[22] the phrase was first given prominent circulation in English by Bernard Lewis in the form: 'First the Saturday People, then the Sunday People,’ in an article written for Commentary in early 1976. Lewis claimed that the phrase was heard in the Arab world on the eve of the Six Day War (1967), and argued that recent developments in Lebanon suggested that the Arabs had reversed their priorities.[23

Because of their relevance for Biblical studies Palestinian proverbs have been the object of close attention.[24]
The proverb in question does not figure among the 5,000 Palestinian
sayings collected by the Bethlehem pastor Sa’īd Abbūd (1933), who, with
regard to sayings dealing with Saturday and Sunday, mentions only one:
‘Saturday is longer than Sunday’, used with a variety of meanings: of
the need to stay open for business given that Saturday is busier; of
people who don’t know their own place, and to a woman whose petticoat is
longer than her dress.[25]

Many sources register this proverb's appearance as an Islamic slogan
daubed on walls or putatively on the Palestinian flag during the years
of the First Intifada (1987-1997).[26][27][28][7]
It was indicative of a tension within the Palestinian resistance as
Hamas emerged to vie with the PLO for the hearts and minds of people.
Historically, Christians have played a distinguished role in the
Palestinian Arab nationalist movement since its inception.[29] The more secular and socialist PLO was able to attract and integrate support and leaders from the Palestinian Christian community like George Habash or Hanan Ashrawi,[30] though figures like Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh graduated to a more radical secular leftist politics.[29]

Several of Professor Aharoni's books deal with the exodus of Jews from Egypt. Her book Not in Vain (Hachette), about the Jewish Hospital in Alexandria has been awarded the Testimony Prize.

On 30 November itself, Professor Aharoni will be launching the French version of her book, published by Le Manuscript, (Thea Wolf: La femme en blanc de l'hopital juif d'Alexandrie) at a Paris lunch organised by the ASPCJE organisation of Jews from Egypt.

Professor Aharoni's favoured message is that greater knowledge of the modern Jewish exodus will appeal to the Arab sense of honour. If Palestinians are made aware that they are not the only victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict, they are more likely to achieve a 'Sulha': permanent peace based on reconciliation. This is also the message of a video she has recorded in Hebrew. Here is the trailer: RIMON HASULHA VE HAKAVOD - THE POMEGRANATE OF RECONCILIATION AND HONOR.

She elaborates on this theme in this second 15- minute video, the Second Exodus and Peace:
Professor Aharoni hopes that her videos will be used to spread greater awareness of the Jewish exodus.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

As organisations around the world prepare to commemorate 30 November, the first official day in the calendar to remember Jewish refugees from Arab lands, it is time to place their story back on the Jewish communal and international agenda, says Shimon Ohayon MK in the Jerusalem Post (with thanks: Lily):

A refugee family in an Israeli ma'abara or transit camp (1950s)

Today, Israel is seen as a colonialist entity in parts of the world, as a
European transplant in the heart of the Middle East which sought, and
continues to seek, to uproot the indigenous Arabs from their ancestral
homes. Of course, there is much that is wrong historically, factually
and morally with this view, whether it stems from ignorance, malice or a
mixture of the two.

However, the greatest antidote to these
falsities is the history and subsequent expulsion of the ancient Jewish
communities in the Middle East and North Africa, the descendants of
which make up around half of the Jewish population of Israel. In the
middle part of the past century there were almost a million Jews living
across the region, whereas today that number is no more than a few
thousand.

While the Land of Israel was the birthplace of the
Jewish people, for thousands of years Jews developed their unique and
indigenous civilization around the Middle East. Jews and Jewish
communities have existed in the Middle East, North Africa, Babylon, the
Levant, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf region for more than 2,500
years. Before the advent of Islam, the Arab conquest and occupation of
the region, Jews even held sovereignty in parts of the Middle East,
including Israel.

During the centuries after the Islamic
conquest, the region became forcibly “Arabized,” becoming known as the
“Arab World,” and the original non-Arab peoples became minorities in
their own lands. Under Islamic rule, Jews were considered dhimmis,
second-class citizens, forced to pay special taxes and wear distinctive
signs and articles of clothing and suffering other discriminatory
decrees and legislation. The position of the Jews was frequently
precarious.

Over the centuries, there were numerous massacres
and ethnic cleansings of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, like
the many Jewish communities in the Arabian peninsula which were wiped
out in the 7th century. In Morocco, Libya and Algeria Jews were forced
to live in ghettos or mellahs. On other occasions, as in places like
Yemen and Iraq (Iran? - ed), Jews were given the choice of converting to Islam or
facing death.

False accusations and blood libels frequently led
to massive riots in Jewish areas leaving many dead, expelled and
degraded. In the 1930s and 1940s there were Nazi-inspired massacres of
Jews in Libya and Algeria, and most infamously in Baghdad, known as the
Farhud.

Following the United Nations Partition Plan, which
recommended the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, the Political
Committee of the Arab League (League of Arab States) drafted a law that
was to govern the legal status of Jewish residents in all Arab League
countries. This law, instituted across the Arab world, demanded that
Jews be seen as enemies and their assets frozen or confiscated and
their citizenship stripped. Jews were frequently imprisoned or worse.

These
and other state-sanctioned repressive measures, coupled often with
violence, precipitated a mass displacement and expulsion of Jews, who
were forced to leave without their assets and property, and caused the
Jewish refugee problem in the Middle East. This problem was exacerbated
by a continuing expulsion and exodus of Jews en masse from Arab
countries until the 1970s.

The personal and communal assets left
behind were substantial, far greater than those lost by Arabs who fled
during Israel’s battle for independence.

Sadly, almost none of this is known, in Israel or around the world.

With
this in mind, earlier in the year I passed a long overdue law that
instituted November 30 as a day in Israel of national commemoration for
the Jewish refugees from Arab countries. On this day, there will be
special Knesset sessions devoted to the issue; the Education Ministry
is enjoined to teach students about the history and expulsion of their
ancestors and the Foreign Ministry will instruct its representatives
around the world to commemorate the occasion appropriately.

With
our partners around the world, organizations like Justice for Jews from
Arab Countries (JJA C) and Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and
North Africa (JIMENA ), based in the US, Harif in the UK and
Organization of Jews of Libya &Sant Egidio in Italy, we are
arranging a host of events around the world, including in Washington,
DC, New York, Montreal, Sydney, Singapore, Paris, London and Rome, and a
commemorative event at the United Nations.

However, there is
still much work to do. Most Jews do not know this history and it is
seldom taught in Jewish schools, synagogues or institutions around the
world.

If we are to rectify this historic injustice we must
first learn about it. Over the next year, a traveling exhibition
created by the Foreign Ministry will be sent to Israeli embassies and
consulates around the world with the intention of informing other
countries around the world about this neglected subject.

It is
vitally important that Jewish communities participate in these events
so that ignorance will no longer be an excuse. The Jewish refugees
issue was recognized in the past by United Nations officials, in peace
agreements and most importantly, under international law.

It is
time that we placed the story of and ultimate redress for the Jewish
refugees from Arab countries back on the Jewish communal and
international agenda.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Tomorrow the UK Jewish Film Festival will screen Jacques Ouaniche's 'Young' Perez, the story of a young Tunisian-Jewish boxing champion who survived the Auschwitz death camp only to die on the Death March. Tunisia was the only country in the Arab world to be directly occupied by the Nazis - from November 1942 to May 1943. How many Tunisian Jews shared Young Perez's fate? Veronique Chemla blogs.

Deportationsof Jews fromTunisia took place in April 1943, three weeks before theliberation of Tunisia. Fortyprisonersdid not return. This is very fewcomparedto the six millionJews killedin continentalEuropeduringthe Holocaust.But itilluminates thenature of thegenocidalprojectof the Nazis.Whereverthe Germans set foot, whether for 24 hours inRhodes,or six monthsin Tunisia*,they persecutedthe Jewishpopulation, in order todestroy it.

An elderly Jewish couple in Casablanca has appealed to King Mohammed V1 to stop 'Mafioso' gangs from threatening to evict them from their home of 50 years. This is not a problem exclusive to Jews. Muslims too have been targeted by these gangs, reports Yabiladi. Here is a rough translation from French:

"With a quiveringvoice,ShalomAbdelhak revealshis identityina video posted onYouTube. A Jewishman of over eighty,visiblyweakened by illness he is seekingtheinterventionof KingMohammed VI in his case.In Moroccandialect, he sayshe and hiswife are victimsof a "group" that is threatening to evict them fromtheir apartmentin Casablanca.

"Shalomhas been rentinghis homefor over46 years.Throughout this period, he said he has had noproblemwith the owners ofthe building.Healsosays heregularly payshis rent. It's thesame storywith his wife, ViessmannMessody, who isalsosick.The latterfears that they willforced to liveon the street at their age.

She accuses"chamkaras" of being behind these threats. They target empty apartments, trying to removewindows,doors and evenmarble andmosaictoshow the authoritiesthat the buildingis at risk of fallinginto disrepair: thenthey orderits demolition.

Shalom says: " we arevery oldand we havenowhere else to go. This is wherewe were born. "

Friday, November 14, 2014

ADL National Director Abraham Foxman presents the Anti-Defamation League’s Daniel Pearl Award to Anne-Marie Revcolevschi, President of The Aladdin Project.

At its Annual General Meeting on 6 November in Los Angeles the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) awarded the prestigious Daniel Pearl prize to the Aladdin project for 'promoting greater understanding between Jews and Muslims'.

Five years ago, Veronique Chemla, a French-Jewish journalist wrote down her misgivings in Front Page magazine. The dalogue promoted by the Aladdin project tiptoes around real bones of contention, throwing the ethnic cleansing of Sephardi/Mizrahi Jewry, among other things, under the bus of mutual understanding.

"We need to go beyond the perennial We are brothers, cousins, shalom, salam!
and engage in a real dialogue with the Muslim word in which we
recognise what unites us but also what divides us," she says. "We need to air our
disagreements in order to build enduring and deep relationships. Jihad
targets 'Jews and Crusaders'. We need to enter into a real dialogue with
Muslims and non-Muslims in order to make them understand the jihadist
threat and build alliances with them.

"Initiatives such as the
'islamically-correct' (anti-Holocaust denial) Aladdin project
marginalise and isolate moderate Muslims and distance Jews from their
anti-jihadist allies. It is not denial and revisionism which feeds
antisemitism but the demonisation and delegitimisation of the State of
Israel."

A delegation of Israelis and other Jews of Moroccan origin visited the Parliament, or Majlis, in Rabat this week. The photos show Casablanca-born Avraham Avizemer who lives in Jaffa, (in the centre in the top picture) and other members of the delegation of the World Federation of Moroccan Jewry.

The delegation, on its annual visit to Morocco, met with the speaker of the Majlis. He said:" Jews and Israelis from around the world need to feel at home here. Morocco invites all Jews of Moroccan origin to come and visit the Kingdom and preserve the call of the past, present and future."

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)